A Sculpture by Gail Hasting: a page torn from a secret
[Back of exhibition catalogue card]

Compression 
It winds its way like an artery through a massive body of solidifying, classified time and knowledge. Our hearts beat with anticipation as we move along the library’s thick spiral staircase. In search of a piece of information, a fact, a figure, we ascend floor upon floor of densely shelved rows crammed with books. The floors of rows, rows of shelves, shelves of books and books of words all become passageways of varying scales through which we pass. While ascending I wonder: could one memory contain all this knowledge? Further still, could one mathematical equation be a passage to all information?
I accidentally pass the floor I need, so retreat while still considering: If all information could be compressed, what would be lost, what would I mourn?

Compression
I sit at one of the library’s study desks to write this accompanying essay. A sign says ‘no speaking’, but the person next to me is restless. They ask, ‘so what do you do?’ My stomach tightens as I ponder whether to own up and say I’m a sculptor. Fear of the following question looms larger than the fear of sounding pretentious: ‘so do you sculpt in wood, marble, stone or wax for casting? Clay maybe?’
‘No. Passageways.’
Silence. The silence I dreaded.
The distance between their idea of sculpture and mine is a vast compression of time — of thought’s passage, ideas and philosophies all compressed and encoded.
I see their view of sculpture as a place where imagination swoons. A place where our senses touch the sensuousness of matter. Where the sculpted form, a moment’s poise, allows the grace of balanced proportions writ large in sensation. A place where you found yourself unexpectedly moved. This is, however, a privileged place; a place few can afford and therefore appreciate. A privilege of place that artists, through transformations, have endeavoured to redress. An uncanny irony causes the silence I dread; for the transformations that redress the privilege create a distance only those schooled in the changes feel confident enough to negotiate. And so the place remains privileged, but of another sort.
I wish to congratulate the stranger for having asked, but how does one reply? Which words might bridge this distance — a distance paved by codification and classified distinctions?
My anguished silence continues.

Compression 
Has your stomach not churned when a curator — having asked to look at your work for no particular reason (‘to stay informed, in touch,’ they say) and who professes to have keenly watched the work’s development — asks within one minute of their visit, ‘so what does it mean?’
In reply I stutter. Before me floods an ocean of events — the apparition of a life (I am told) a person has before drowning. I drown trying to compress this immense ocean into two sentences of meaning.
Does the curator not know how to let the work speak for itself? I would like to be outraged, but am polite and suggest the work has no specific meaning, no hidden goal, only a passage of events not unlike the sensuality you might meet through a moment’s poise at the unexpected yet delightful place you find at the end of a conversation’s passage. Once the curator leaves, I privately admit art cannot speak for itself for the oversimplified reason that it is never by itself. Inherent in the process of publicly exhibiting artwork is an accompaniment of status symbols (the artist’s name, curriculum vitae, hierarchy of venues).
The hard work for art, now, in recognising it does not speak by itself, is not to let the compression of signifiers reliant on status and commentary to speak for it.

Expansion
Seeking guidance for this essay, I browse a row of books. Selecting one, I turn to a page and read ‘science is endeavouring to discover a Theory of Everything’. A mathematical equation of compressed information will represent the Theory of Everything. Desiring to understand, I turn the page and am affronted. Before me, running over the words, sprinting so as not to get caught, is a child’s robust scribble. It is the scribble of quick fury, a moment a child snatches unobserved by a parent looking elsewhere while perhaps driving to the library to return the book with the child in the back seat. Its rage is a silent protest against the absurdity of growing up, as summoned by the indignity suffered upon discovering life is not about possibility and expansion, but probability and compression. Shelved. And yet, although the physical scale of the library’s passageways diminish with compression from floors to rows to books, the place to which the most diminished — a sentence of words — eventually leads is enormous. It opens up in thought to contain you and me, the trees and flowers, the sun and moon — and the library. It is a place where our imagination swoons. A place where our senses touch the sensuousness of matter; where a moment’s poise writes in the grace of balance and proportions. It is impossible to explain the meaning of this place when a curator asks, as it is a passage through which to discover the unexpected incident of a moment gone astray such as a scribble of outrage: a page torn from a secret.
It is a passage this sculpture plans to invoke when every day for one month Penelope Aitken, the assistant of ACCA, enters the gallery and closes the back door’s blind at 4:43pm.
It is to be a passage where the real and the imagined intermingle to create the possibilities no word, theory or mathematical equation can compress.

Gail Hastings, 1993
Re-edited November 2022

1. ‘In general, the shorter the possible representation of a string of numbers, the less random it is. If there is no abbreviated representation at all, then the string is random in the real sense that it contains no discernible order that can be exploited to code its information content more concisely. It has no representation short of a full listing of itself. Any string of symbols that can be given an abbreviated representation is called algorithmically compressible.

On this view, we recognise science to be the search for algorithmic compressions. We list sequences of observed data. We try to formulate algorithms that compactly represent the information content of those sequences. Then we test the correctness of our hypothetical abbreviations by using them to predict the next terms in the string. These predictions can then be compared with the future direction of the data sequence. Without the development of algorithmic compressions of data all science would be replaced by mindless stamp collecting – the indiscriminate accumulation of every available fact. Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for the Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe’s properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.’

– John D. Barrow, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, Oxford University Press, 1990, p.11New Text file